Before and after pictures

Here's what I looked like before I became a healthy vegan. I was 45 years old, and ate the Standard American Diet.

I looked okay, but I always felt like a dork, to be honest. More importantly was how I felt, which was not great.

Here's a picture of me and my dad about to embark on an exciting adventure, flying my airplane to Alaska. Whenever I looked at this picture, instead of thinking, "what a great trip!", I thought, "I wish I weren't so dorky. "

Funnily enough, this one just cracked me up:

The pants didn't flatter me.

I weighed about 150-155 in those pictures. I'm 5'9". I purchased my first pair of size 16 pants in Spring 2005, and thought that was just a natural part of aging. Then I became vegetarian for environmental reasons, and secretly because I didn't want to eat animals (I barely admitted that to myself). I learned more about animal suffering and became vegan in July 2005. I lost weight over the next year, and felt better, which caused me to investigate this surprising result, and I discovered the unbelievable health benefits of eating a mostly vegan whole foods diet through websites like Drs. McDougall, Fuhrman, and Barnard. Here's a post describing how my health improved. So, as I mentioned in some other posts, I discovered the route to health by accident!

Now I just turned 49 and I weigh 120 lbs. I do wonder if that's a little low for my height but it is stable, and I have never had much muscle mass even though I've always enjoyed physical activity.

Here's the tired and weakling vegan:

Here's me at White Sands National Monument on our recent vacation. The wind was blowing really strong.

Another vacation picture:

In a furniture store last fall modeling our new bench.

At Dr. Fuhrman's Healthy Getaway in Florida with Gail. She told me to post the bikini picture but that would really be embarrassing: